“If we're going to impact our world in the name of Jesus, it will be because people like you and me took action in the power of the Spirit. Ever since the mission and ministry of Jesus, God has never stopped calling for a movement of "Little Jesuses" to follow him into the world and unleash the remarkable redemptive genius that lies in the very message we carry. Given the situation of the Church in the West, much will now depend on whether we are willing to break out of a stifling herd instinct and find God again in the context of the advancing kingdom of God.”
Source: The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church
“Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people's perception of the gospel.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture, we must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“There is no doubt that to walk with Jesus means to walk on the wilder side of life.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“But the standard churchy spirituality doesn't require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.”
“In order to develop a pioneering missional spirit, a capacity for genuine ecclesial innovation, let along engender daring discipleship, we are going to need the capacity to take a courageous stand when and where necessary.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“When there is no possibility of retreat, we will find the innovation that only the liminal situation can bring. In short, we find the faith of leap.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relation between the two.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.”
“Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age, it not only abandons its biblical mandate, it is rendered missionally ineffective.”
“Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.”
“If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Nowadays we raise our children in a cocoon of domesticated security, far from any sense of risk or adventure.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion, who knows what innovation, what freshness, what new insights from the Spirit will emerge.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Because we believe that somewhere in the nest of paradigms contained in the phrase "missional church" lies nothing less that the future viability of Western Christianity.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus's name.”
“Put simply, the church finds itself in a post-Christendom era, and it had better do some serious reflection or face increasing decline and eventual irrelevance.”
“Most churches don't have the resources for these tricks and inducements but are still bound to the imagination that church happens on a Sunday in a building.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“The fact is that if Jesus's future kingdom is secure, those who trust in its coming will enact it now.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Christianity is an adventure of the spirit or it is not Christianity.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Whether we like it or not, we are all on a journey, a Quest if you will, every day of our lives, and the path we must take is full of perils, and our destiny can never be predicted in advance.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“It is vital to see ourselves as part of an ongoing journey started by our heroes in the Scriptures.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Those of us with too much invested in the way things are will never embrace the revolutionary cause required for wholesale change.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Interestingly, it's as though the gospel story of Jesus is the archetypal heroic journey, the embodiment of the very adventure that all people in every epoch have desired.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“The quest for heroic adventure then is a quest for the gospel, although it might not be seen that way by everyone.”
“The appetite for adventure and risk is not exclusive to young Christians. In face, it seems to be a fundamental yearning, knitted into the fabric of the human soul.”
“The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“Mission is the practical demonstration, whether by speech or by action, of the glorious lordship of Jesus.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.”
Source: The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage
“I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will.”
Source: The Forgotten Ways
“Truth is narrow, but grace is wide.”
“We have to assume now that all mission is cross-cultural.”
“You cannot sell a Christendom approach to a post-Christian world. They are anti-Christian.”
“Go among the people. Don't assume you know what church looks like.”
“You plant the gospel. You don't plant churches.”
“More data is not always the answer.”
“Judgments about who belongs in the Hall of Fame are extremely subjective.”
“In short, apostolic movement involves a radical community of disciples, centered on the lordship of Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, built squarely on a fivefold ministry, organized around mission where everyone (not just professionals) is considered an empowered agent, and tends to be decentralized in organizational structure.”
Source: The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church
“A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.”
Source: The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church
